NaPoWriMo Day 5: Fun Fact!

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Table of Contents

• Freewrite

• Poem: “Pavlov Was the Son of a Priest” by Paige Le …

• Prompt

Freewrite

With this freewrite, as well as all freewrites, do not put any pressure on yourself to be good. You are simply getting thoughts on the page. You can write in poetry or in prose, but feel free to write poorly, sloppily, redundantly, and with cliches. Now is the time for ideas—we will eventually sculpt those ideas into art.

Did you know that strawberries have 8 sets of DNA? That the word “disaster” comes from the Latin for “bad star”? That the actress Hedy Lamarr developed the groundwork for wireless technologies like Bluetooth and Wi-Fi?

Those are just a few fun facts. What are yours? Spend 8-10 minutes making a list of fun facts—ones you take personal enjoyment in, or change the way you see the world.

Poem: “Pavlov Was the Son of a Priest” by Paige Lewis

Pavlov Was the Son of a Priest

which is a biographical fact only ever stated
when discussing a man of either unrivaled
righteousness or extreme wickedness.

Imagine this: he never once used a bell
in his saliva experiments, unless you count
the plink of kibble falling from his dogs'

surgically opened throats, and why would
you count that? I admit I often tell you
about the cruelties of others to stifle

the growling in my own troubled core. I
sense something is about to happen, though
I can't tell you what because last night,

after I prophesized that a man would steal
the Smithsonian's rare and hideous pumpkin
diamonds, I had no fun at all crouching

behind the museum's display cases until
the night guard carried us out by our ears.
She told you, Treat your mouth less

like a garbage chute. She told me, Forget
what you think you know about space. But I
only really know about its violence. I forget

that the moon smells like spent gunpowder.
I forget what would happen to your body
in a black hole. I don't forget your body.

This would be unforgivable, and I have
so many strikes against me already. I'm sorry
I couldn't hide my joy when you said lonely.

It made me feel useful. I used to be aimless—
swallowing marbles and clicking my way
through cities, licking my thumbs to smooth

the eyebrows of almost any man. Now, I
demand a love that is stupid and beautiful,
like a pilot turning off her engines midflight

to listen for rain on wings. I want to find
you a peach so ripe that even your breath
would bruise it. I want to press its velvet

heat against your cheek, make you edge
into the bite until your mouth is too wet
to ask questions. If something happens,

let it. I admit I couldn't hear the thief's
footsteps over the museum alarm, but
I'm certain that if the diamonds jostling

against ugly diamonds in his drawstring
bag sounded like anything, they sounded
like bells.

I like to think of poems as little dares. This poem dares to find meaning in something as cold and unforgiving as Pavlovian psychology—though, as I’m sure you realized after reading the poem, it’s not really about Pavlov.

What is it about? This is often a dangerous question to ask about poetry, because poems don’t really strive for “aboutness”—but I end this poem resonating with the speaker’s struggle for “a love that is stupid and beautiful.”

What the poem is doing is finding insight from a kind of fun fact. What does it mean, or matter, that Pavlov was the son of a priest? Well, right there is a bit of irony: Pavlovian psychology has something sort of unholy and scientific about it. It argues that animal psychology is a set of inputs and outputs, of programs and programmed reactions. Even if this is true, it’s not altogether comforting, especially given Pavlov’s relationship to his dogs.

Lewis unravels that irony, and at the end of that unraveling, we come upon the speaker’s own complex relationship to love and desire. They like being needed, being the cure to someone’s loneliness; they find purpose in love, even if love, as Pavlovian psychology might argue, is also just a set of inputs and outputs, of programmed reactions.

On a craft level, I love how this poem returns to Pavlov at a moment of epiphany. It returns to the anecdote at the Smithsonian, the stolen diamonds tinkling against each other like bells, and the bells are transformed—they are no longer tools of scientific research, they are signifiers of beauty, purpose, meaning. I imagine the speaker’s own heart beating like a bright blue bell, their search for love sated, musical.

As a final craft note, you might be interested in Richard Hugo’s ideas of the initiating versus the generated subject. Basically, Hugo argues that a poem has the “initiating subject,” which is the topic that brought a poet to the page, and the “generated subject,” which is what the poem is actually about, and which is discovered through exploring the initiating subject.

In other words, Lewis takes a leap from a fun fact about Pavlov to discovering something about their own relationship to love. I encourage you to take those leaps in your own poetry: diverge from what is expected, and uncover something deeper and truer about life.

If it interests you, you can learn more about the initiating vs generated subject at this craft essay. Incidentally, it also focuses on a poem by Paige Lewis, a coincidence I only noticed after I finished writing this newsletter.

Prompt

Use at least one of your fun facts to uncover something surprising or insightful, either about yourself or the world around you. Take the leap from the familiar to the unexpected as you glean deeper meaning from your fun fact(s).